AP UX Week '07: New Sources of Inspiration for Interaction Design

[Live blogged from Adaptive Path UX Week 2007. New Sources of Inspiration for Interaction Design by Dan Saffer]

Where does inspiration come from?

When we think about inspiration we often start by thinking "WWAD?" Apple is a rich source of inspiration. We also go to books like Designing Interfaces or a pattern library to look for how other people have solved similar problems.

But sometimes we need to get outside our space, outside our medium.

We don't need to turn to other digital products to get inspiration, we can look to the world at large as a source of inspiration. This is a little big so let's narrow it down a bit. We can look to other object made by human hands: architecture, film, and mechanical objects.

Here we are looking more at product than process. To do this we need to reset and start with a beginners mind. Look at these new things with fresh eyes. Look for the complexity of everyday gestures.

Architecture

Start with the Winchester Mystery House. The woman who built this house kept building it in the hope that if she kept building she wouldn't die. This mess of a house is what you don't want to be inspired by in architecture.

So what can we learn from?

Houses, however, are particular interesting because they are where people do a small amount of work. So what is it about these things that we can learn from?

A building must do two things: it must shelter us and it must speak to us of the things we find important and need to be reminded of. John Ruskin

Buildings must be strong, useful, and aesthetically pleasing.

Compare the floorplan of a modern building with a Victorian building you see that houses now devote tremendous real estate to the garage while Victorian homes devote more space to socializing.

In essence, what works of design and architect talk to us about is the kind of life that would most appropriately unfold within and around them... They speak of visions of happiness. "Alain de Botton":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_de_Botton

Now look at Twitter and think about what matters. It is all about YOU and what YOU have to say. The Victorians would never build something like this.

What works for the design of a church won't work for McDonalds or for your house. Think about web pages and applications from this perspective. The standards are just patterns that we should tweak to meet the design problem we are trying to solve.

Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. "William Morris":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_morris

Look at the Gamble House.

Though large, the home is very approachable. There is a lamp near the door to light the way but it also holds the house number. Instead of marring the door with the number, it is integrated into the lamp.

Yahoo is doing something similiar with their menu bar. They use the menu bar to adapt to use and brilliantly integrate form and function.

In the living room of the Gamble house there is this amazing fireplace. The ceiling is designed to denote separation within the space. There are built-in cabinets in different spaces designed to hold the materials that will be used in that space.

Adobe uses a drawer metaphor in CS3 to similar effect.

In the Gamble House, even the functional is made beautiful. The straps attached to the ceiling beams are designed. The attention to detail is deeply beautiful. It demonstrates what is important to the designer.

Film

Film is all about movement. There are many pieces to film.

Remember the scene in Indiana Jones where he is flying around the world. This inspired Jeff Veen to solve a design problem in Google Analytics.

If you watch The Birds you'll notice that there isn't a soundtrack for most of it.

Science fiction can be very inspiring. Think about Minority Report and then watch Jeff Han's multi-touch interface.

Title credits can also be very inspiring. Saul Bass's titles for Anatomy of A Murder and Psycho are great example. This art form dropped off for a while but movies like Seven and Catch Me if You Can are bringing it back.

Look at the Digg Swarm designed by Stamen and you will see how movement can make for amazing interactive experiences.

Mechanical Objects

Why look at mechanical objects in our digital world? They have been around much longer and we have stolen many interface design metaphors from them. Our digital products just haven't had the time evolve that mechanical objects have had.

Compare the Braun calculator from 1972 and the iPhone.

Dashboards and control panels are a great place to start. They are made up of:

• displays
• controls
• labels

Displays give you information, controls allow you to manipulate the system, and the labels tell you what the controls can do.

"Invisible State" dashboards tell you what is happening inside something that you can't see. In this interfaces, display is very important because it communicates the state of the system. You see this in many executive dashboards.

"Infrequent-use control panels" are the opposite. The display is a small part of these panels. Controls and labels are huge. In these situations, the display can act like a label. We see this in kiosks all the time.

"Direct manipulation" consoles almost eliminate display because the feedback is right in front of you. Think about a crane operator's control panel. He or she can see the crane swinging and doesn't need a display to tell this.

We can learn from the parts of mechanical objects and break them down.

Look at the design of the controls on a Vespa. Toys are also a great source of inspirations. Look at the typography on a 1951 Hudson Hornet. The way that type is used give the interface a very specific feel.

There are a number of very basic lessons we can take from physical objects:

• Labels should connect to controls
• Icons are hard
• Icons are really good in some cases
• Make clever controls

On this parking meter example there is a "maximum time" button. This anticipates a common use.

But mechanical objects also show mistakes. Don't label your labels. This shows that you have designed it wrong. Don't make things look like buttons that aren't buttons. If you have to tell people where to start, you are probably doing it wrong.

Conclusion

When it comes time to design the next thing, step out into the world and look around for inspiration.

Q: How do you work across disciplines, and get inspiration from your own products?

A: This is an interesting problems. How do you introduce a paradigm across design languages? Don't really know the answer but it is a very interesting issue.

Q: Many of the examples of bad design you showed are patches applied later to fix an initially bad design.

A: It is much harder to fix atoms than bits. "We've already got these things out there, how do we fix this?" Some of the fixes do help people use the product but there comes a point where too many Band-Aids make your thing all Band-Aids.

Q: Glib response to the earlier question about inspiration from your own products. Go back to WWAD. Apple has an amazing design language across media from software to hardware to physical stores. To go back to the iPhone it is amazing to see how effective animated transitions can be when they are done well.

A: Exactly. Transitions really give it character. The movement, the tissue between the features is so rich that it is a hard thing to pull over. It isn't about features at that point.

Q: Can talk about where this idea came from you and how you got started?

A: Inspired by Bill DeRouchey's work. Keeps a library of these examples and thumbs through them for ideas. Think about what your problem is like and then look for how other people have solved it (across media). It isn't perfect but the point is to use these things to refresh when you get stuck.

Q: What about when users fix bad design in the world?

A: There is a book about these things, the workarounds people have done to fix broken things in the world. Some of these are much better than the design choices made by professional designers. If you see these when you are doing contextual inquiry and ethnography work you can learn from them.